Laundries were once ubiquitous in British and American cities--products of the same historical process that created steel mills and railroads. Unlike the more familiar examples of industrialization, these cleanliness factories remained powerfully identified with domesticity. In Steam Laundries, Arwen Mohun explores broader issues of how gender has shaped how everyday work gets done, who does the work, and how the work is valued. The British-American comparison further reveals differences owing to culture, regulation, and social structure as well as the unexpected transatlantic...
Laundries were once ubiquitous in British and American cities--products of the same historical process that created steel mills and railroads. Unli...
For most of human experience, certainly of late, the artifacts of technological civilization have become closely associated with gender, sometimes for physiological reasons (brassieres or condoms, for example) but more often because of social and cultural factors, both obvious and obscure. Because these stereotypes necessarily have economic, social, and political consequences, understanding how gender shapes the ways we view and use technology--and how technology shapes our concept of gender--has emerged as a matter of serious scholarly importance. Gender and Technology brings...
For most of human experience, certainly of late, the artifacts of technological civilization have become closely associated with gender, sometimes ...